envy

all quotes from this book, chapter 3: envy

"envy lacks cultural recognition as a valid mode of publicly recognizing or responding to social disparities, even though it remains the only agonistic emotion defined as having a perceived inequality as its object. this invalidation is most powerfully exemplified by envy's integration into the nineteenth-century ideologeme of ressentiment: the 'diseased passion' which, as fredric jameson notes, enabled the discrediting of genuine political impulses by ascribing them to 'private dissatisfactions' or psychological flaws."

"whereas envy and jealousy were 'dramatically transformed' into female characteristics in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century this feminization was accompanied by intensified social prohibition against their expression."

"the fact that the feminization and moralization of envy have operated in collusion to suppress its potential as a means of recognizing and polemically responding to social inequalities, casting suspicion on the possible validity of such a response and converting it into a reflection of petty or 'diseased' selfhood, should alert us to the fact that forms of negative affect are more likely to be stripped of their critical implications when the impassioned subject is female. envy's concomitant feminization and moral devaluation thus points to a larger cultural anxiety over antagonistic responses to inequality that are made specifically by women. as we shall see in the next section, this anxiety about female antagonism in general comes to a particular head in academic feminism, especially when it involves representations of antagonistic relations between women."

"[these films] represent women's friendships as plagued by jealousy, envy, and competition for men, and they teach women to beware of and fear one another. by focusing so strongly on conflicts between women, they obscure other issues related to women's position in society, relieve men of any responsibility for women's problems, and suggest, instead, that women should grant men primary importance in their lives because they are the only ones upon whom women can rely." -karen hollinger

"let's say there is a certain model of femininity that i recognize as culturally desirable and invested with a certain degree of power. if from a feminist standpoint what i struggle with most is my having been acculturated into admiring and desiring that femininity, envy would seem to enable me to critically negotiate rather than simply disavow or repudiate this desire, which would entail positing myself as immune to acculturation. moreover, envy would facilitate a transition from desire to antagonism that might enable me to articulate what i have been trained to admire as something possibly threatening or harmful to me. as klein notes, it is only once the ideal object is envied that it becomes viewed as persecutory - a view that in turn mobilizes the subject's efforts to criticize and transform it, and transform its value or status as property in particular, spoiling it and 'rob[bing] it of what it possesses'."

"if... there is to be a productive 'transition from the critique of patriarchal masculinism to internal struggle withing feminism,' a transition in which we shift from a mode of critique 'embroiled, indeed embattled, in a heterosexual paradigm in which women's relationships to men are centrally interrogated' to one that is 'fundamentally a homosocial circuit in which feminism signifies from the conflicted terrain of relations among women', the affective dimension of feminism, including all its ugly feelings, need to be taken far more seriously than it has been so far."

"once a group has fought for and attained a certain degree of political recognition, the demand that its members be 'good examples' can easily turn repressive, especially when the demand emanates from outside rather than from within. this imperative often takes the following form: 'you, having declared yourself an example of X - perhaps in the initial struggle to secure social recognition and visibility for X - must now exemplify X as a fixed concept which you merely refer back to or reflect.' a corollary of this logic would be the following: 'in your failure to adequately exemplify X, you threaten the validity and legitimacy of X, as well as any group formation or collective identity based on X.' to use gubar's metaphor, the implication is that a group becomes 'sick' when its members become examples that do not properly exemplify. this assumption that collective strength depends on good exemplarity bears a close resemblance to the concept of the ego ideal that freud develops in group psychology, as well as the common assumption that one must identify with whatever one emulates or strives towards."

"the political act of feminist group formation thus entails producing 'group feeling,' though not necessarily the antagonism-free, identification-based 'group feeling'. . . here the compound subject is produced not by making two into one . . . but rather by making one into two, single white female could be said to allegorize the state of contemporary feminism as internally divided or split, yet held together by this very split."